lunes, 15 de febrero de 2016

The situation was becoming more and more
uncontrollable. Bodies had ben found everywhere now and people were starting to
wake up, to ask questions and to really ask the questions that they should have
been asking for years. They were protests all around, riots and even murders
due to the revelations that had occurred recently. All wars, all confrontations
of any kind, had been stopped. It appeared to have been a miracle but it had
nothing to do with that. Miracles didn’t exist anymore, magi died and only
truth was there to comfort the lives of so many people that now found solace in
the new reality that was hitting everyone straight in their faces, in their
families and communities. Everything was there and people had to take their
stand.

The director of intelligence reunited with the
president that week. No one knew about that meeting except top officials in the
government. The two men discussed the best course of action. As predicted, the
intelligence leader wanted everything to be covered, to be hidden from the
people and blame everything else for the deformed bodies that were being found.
But the president knew very well that the people knew the truth and they
weren’t going to throw it away just because two men said something that was
obviously not true. They had to find the way to reveal the truth but in the
best way possible. That was the idea of the president and he knew he had no
choice in the matter.

The announcement was done the following week
and everyone in the country, and the world, was shocked in the most violent
way. People knew but they still couldn’t believe it. It was too much for many
and the predicted suicides happened, impossible to be stopped or prevented.
Some murders too, in the name of so many things that people didn’t even understand.
Others, in the other hand, turned to science and objective thought and tried to
adapt to the new reality but no matter how smart a person was, the concept that
they were dealing with was too grand, to big to understand in one take. It was
obvious humanity would take several years or centuries or who knows how much to
understand what was happening and its consequences.

The first case, the newspapers said, had been
the one of Michael Collins and his sister Colleen. They were two teenage kids
that had wandered into a deserted area and had been the first to be found dead
and deformed by a local policeman. The case was almost a cover up if it hadn’t
been for the pictures that policeman took before his companions and members of
military intelligence arrived. That case was twenty years old and the man had
hidden the pictures for eighteen of those years until he decided he needed money and attention and revealed them to the world. However, the world thought
it was a hoax.

But months after he revealed his pictures,
more images and proof started being revealed in other countries, less prone to
cover ups. And then it happened, bodies began to pile up very high or so it
seemed. They were everywhere, appearing in forests and rivers but also in homes
and office building. There was a famous case when four bodies were discovered
on top the tallest building of the capital city. No one ever knew how they got
up there, especially because the bodies belonged to four farmers from a remote
region. But there they were, deformed ad the rest. It caused so much sensation
and fascination that it became the case that everyone went to when talking
about the subject as whole.

The medical colleges reunited to settle how
deformed all the bodies were and which were the main characteristics. They
agreed that the most obvious new feature on the bodies was the loss of both
eyeballs on the victim and the elongation of the eyeball cavity by several
centimeters. The head of every victim was also modified, now looking a little
bit larger, to adjust to the new cavities in it. The mouth in all victims had
dried up, the lips almost disappearing. The nose of many had shrunk somehow,
probably asphyxiating them if they weren’t dead by then. All extremities were
incredibly thin, as if they had been deprived of everything a human needed to
live. And another shocking fact was that none of the victims had their sexual
organs. Everything had been removed.

When that report had been releases by the
medical associations, even those that still did not believe in what was
happening was caught by the amount of detail and proper investigation these men
and women had done. They had checked over one thousand bodies for their report
and had no way of being wrong or been exaggerated. Every single body had the same
issues and one more, with which they closed the inform: every body was
radioactive. They had discovered this by accident with one of them but then
checked them all and every single corpse was deemed extremely toxic. Of course
this was very bad news for the teams working on the matter.

Every doctor and nurse was checked for
radioactivity and no one was found to be seriously contaminated, although some
did have some in their bodies. The government guaranteed they would be well
taken care of by the state but no one believed in anything the government said
anymore. Now it was obvious they had been covering everything up and people
wanted head to roll. Elections were scheduled within the next month and a new
party, founded by the people, won the election. The new president was one of
the women that had done the autopsies on many of the corpses. People trusted
her.

But the new president was also bombarded with
questions. What was happening and why was this happening? Were there new cases?
Were there under some kind of attack? Of course, she was unable to answer any
of those questions. She had no idea about any of that and the scientific
community was as confused and restrained as the rest of the world. They had no
idea how to deal with everything, trying to help people as well as they could
but that wasn’t enough. Most were just shocked and would never be okay again.
They had seen their family members die and didn’t know how and it was obvious
there was something else beyond all of this massacre and mystery but it was
difficult to figure out. That was until one last piece of the puzzle came to
be.

That piece was another finding of bodies. A
large mass grave in a remote area. A native community had found it and all the
forces of security converged there as well as the associations supporting the
families of the victims. They wanted to know who was the victim now but they
found out much more than that. They dug up a huge piece of the land,
discovering not only human corpses, deformed as the other ones, but also animal
corpses that had been horribly modified. Some people screamed when they saw
those, unable to understand what would cause nature to mutate like that, to
create some sort of monsters. The answer was close by and it was discovered by
the end of that year.

More bodies but these weren’t human. They were
something else. They did not seem to have been dead for a short time and it was
concluded they had died at least a thousand years ago but the other bodies were
recent. It was a mystery no one ever solved but it didn’t change anything.
Because the world confirmed what it already knew. Creatures from beyond the
star were there and they had been killing people, no one knew if intentionally
or not. Those bodies confirmed they had been there for a while and that maybe
that had found a way to adapt to society. Maybe they had found a way into the
human heart.

Further investigations revealed that all the
deformed bodies belonged to former extraterrestrials. Apparently, they had
found a way to adapt their physicality to our own and had been living with
everyone else for years and years. They had no sexual organs and it was
confirmed that none of the victims had children, only adopted ones. How people
overlooked that important fact seemed strange. But what was even stranger was
that those creatures had been living on Earth for so long that they had to
become humans. They had to turn themselves into something else because they had
been left there, stranded probably. And people know begged them to reveal
themselves completely but that didn’t have to happen because they were all dead
and no one knew why.

lunes, 2 de noviembre de 2015

The wind roared and roared. It seemed like
it carried the voices of thousands of people long deceased, as if it all of
them had decided that life on planet L should be eradicated. For thousands of
years, the elders had gathered every single piece of mysticism and mythology,
every tale and story told by a grandmother or a priest. And in many of those
tales the wind played a very important role. It was always a destructive force,
a very awful power of nature that menaced everything on its path, specially the
sensible civilization that had grown on L. Despite their advancements in many
fields, they still hadn’t been able to put an end to the never-ending problem
of the wind. Besides, they knew that doing anything against it would cause
consequences and who knew what those might be.

Planet L was mostly water, so the wind didn’t
really have obstacles that would stop it, like mountain ranges. On L, the only
obstacles were caves dug underground by centuries of people trying to find a
solution for their awful problem. They had also tried to build walls but that
had failed fast. The only way to properly survive was underground, below the
few continental masses of the planet. The cities below were small and very
damp, but the people had adapted fast and did not care anymore. They had also
developed a great sense of hearing and of sight, meaning they could navigate
the caves without fear of getting lost or hurt by falling or something like
that.

Their way of living was the main reason no one
in that area of the galaxy knew of their existence. Funny enough, many
creatures of the universe knew planet L. Pirates, bounty hunters and warriors
met there sometimes to exchange prisoners, goods or just to kill each other off
in very bloody battles. Almost all alien creatures could withstand the wind
easily, at least in some regions. And they liked that it made a cover for them,
in case authorities followed them from other systems. But the inhabitants of L
had no idea this had been going on for a long time. Their personal belief was
that no one on the galaxy would be interested in landing in such a nightmare of
a planet.

One day, however, something rather different
happened. Two ships entered L at very high speed, breaking the sound barrier
several times. One was after the other and, from time to time, it fired on it.
They had cannons mounted everywhere so one could only think they were bounty
hunters or assassins. The ship being attacked caught fire but kept fleeing into
some more shots mad it crash into one of the largest islands of the windy
world. The ship that went down exploded and the other one just left, its crew
thinking that all life inside of the downed ship would soon be dead, if it
already wasn’t. It was a matter of time.

Below, the people of a city had felt the tremor
of the ship crashing into the ground. They had been scared for a moment, but
then remembered that the weather report had clarified that a very strong storm
was going to take place outside, so it was better to stay at home and close all
doors, just in case the wind breached the main entrance. That was almost
impossible as the main entrance was made from an incredibly strong type of
metal they had found when building the caves, but these people preferred to
play it safe, specially when from their houses they could hear the moaning of
the wind and the voices of all creatures that had died out there in it. For the
young ones, the wind was a monster to avoid. For the older ones, it was the
difference between life and death and the thing that kept them there, at home.

As they all ran to their houses and took
shelter from the sound of the wind, in the downed ship its pilot was struggling
to get out of there fast. The other members of its crew had been killed and he
was the only one capable to transport their precious cargo back to their home
planet. The treasure was on a small chest he grabbed with bloodied hands. He
put it on a bag, which in turn he put on his back. He checked conditions
outside but couldn’t wait for the computer to calculate anything. Partly
because it had been damaged in the crash but also because there was gasoline
leaking all over the place. He didn’t have time to wait so he just put on a
suit and went outside. The wind knocked him off at first but then he managed to
sink his feet into the ground and at least walk slowly.

The storm was too strong but he managed to
walk away from the ship a few meters just before it exploded. He was pushed
away, landing on a puddle of mud and dirty water. The strength of the explosion
caused him to lose his balance and stability for a while. He even bled from one
if his ears but he could still hear fine, or so its seemed at least in the
middle of the storm. He had nowhere to go now so we just stood up and slowly
walked away from the wreckage. He turned around to see his ship one last time
and a small tear slid down his face. He had lived in that ship for years, but
now he had to move on and try to get someone to pick him up there. His suit had
a communications device but the wind wouldn’t let it work.

In the city below, as he tried to use the
device, a red light appeared in one of the consoles that checked security all
over the city. The computer had detected the device that the stranded alien was
using out there. But there was no one there to see it. Everyone had been
ordered to their homes due to the storm, to their fear of a wind that just
couldn’t get inside their city. However, there was a lonely native of L who
happened to be a priest. Secretly, he left his door opened when a storm
happened, as he loved the sound of the voices. He thought he could hear in the
wind what his ancestors wanted for all of them.

That priest was the only creature that heard
the destruction of the ship outside and he knew, right away, that that sound
had nothing to do with the storm. He ran to the metallic door that separated
the city from the outside world but just stood there, as if it was going to
open magically. Of course, it didn’t and he didn’t dare to open it by himself.
Doing so would mean the death penalty, by precisely stepping outside and never
coming back. The rules of their civilization were pretty clear and even it
moment, when his desire to see what was outside was so big in his heart, even
then he just couldn’t do anything. He just stood there by the door, waiting for
one more sound to make him do something crazy or at least let him know they
weren’t alone.

Outside, the stranded one was walking
clumsily, falling over very often, and almost going insane due to the voices
that he could now hear very clearly around him. He didn’t have a clue of what
they said, but he had a feeling it wasn’t anything good. Finally his device
began beeping and he thought that some ship was en route to save him. But that
wasn’t it. It had detected an energy source ahead, which might lead to life or
at least to a shelter. Going more and more crazy by the minute, he walked in
that suit as fast as he could, careful not to drop his bag with the small chest
inside. He had a massive headache and he knew he was bleeding but he just kept
on going.

Then, the priest heard a sound on the door. It
had been a subtle, soft sound but he knew he had heard it… Again! It was as if
someone was trying to know but didn’t have the strength to do it. As one of the
few that dared to listen to his planet, the priest knew this time the death
penalty was worth it. Even if there was nothing there when the door opened, he
knew something else had happened and that was good enough for him. He then ran
to the control panel and entered a password that had never been used. The door
moaned, as everything turned to lift it over the priest’s head. The wind
entered from the outside like a plague but he felt something else enter so he
closed the door instantly.

When the metallic door had fallen into its place,
the priest turned around and saw the stranded alien lying on the cave’s floor.
He was bleeding or at least that was what it looked like. Their blood was
yellow and his was green. His breath was slowing down. The priest dragged the
body to his house and there checked the alien. It was risky, but he took off
the helmet. He waited but nothing happened so he got to work and cured him as
well as he could. He removed him from the suit and put the bag with the chest
on a chair nearby. For days, no one knew there was an alien in that house and
they wouldn’t think twice about the bag on the chair.

As it happened, that bag carried the most
important object in the universe. And it was a coincidence, a very happy one to
be precise, that it had landed in that forgotten part of the universe as many
hands wanted that thing but only one person could manage to handle it. And that
person was not very far now.